Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday April 11, 2014 @02:55PM
from the rumors-on-the-internet-surely-you-jest dept.

hackingbear writes: "Qin Zhihui, a user of the Chinese Twitter-like website Weibo, has confessed in court to spreading false rumors about the Chinese government in the first public trial under a Chinese crackdown on online rumors. China has threatened criminal penalties against anyone who spreads rumors on microblogs that are reposted more than 500 times, or seen by more than 5,000 users. Qin invented a story that the government gave 200m yuan (US$32m) in compensation to the family of a foreign passenger killed in a high-speed train crash in 2011 in order to incite hatred to the government which gave much lower compensation to Chinese nationals. The Chinese government did have policies in the past to give more compensations to foreigners than locals in disasters, though those policies have been phased out in recent years. Online rumours are particularly pervasive in China, where traditional media is heavily regulated by the government and public trust in the media is low."

Why do you assume the American public is not capable of locating other media outlets across the world? Do you think you are some how smarter then everyone else? It's becoming harder everyday to get to the truth about anything. Media outlets with prejudicial and biased editorial lines publish nothing more than opinions which are usually derived from information taken out of context and purposely omitting any facts that would contradict the publishers predetermined stance. It's become a competition between th

No. We have to hunt for news while you've got it all in "megamarts" and most see no need to go beyond Fox or whatever news source they have because it seems to provide everything.Even if I tune into one 24 hour radio station I get programs from four different partners around the world, and they announce who they are which makes me aware of where to look on the net for varied news sources. In a news "megamart" that doesn't happen - no perceived need

Nowadays, all you do is hear the media's description of what the candidate is saying, and one of the strange things about it is that politics is now presented in terms of politicians and not politics. I don't think the media is interested in politics, they're interested in politicians, which is a wholly different subject... who's doing this, about their private life, about their background, about what they must be thinking, might be thinking when they said something, why did they say it; but what they say i

Even in the US saying/writing something incorrect is still not libel/slander without proving malicious intent which is, as you mentioned, has a high bar. It's why the former Weekly World News, National Enquirer, etc. can get away with printing lots of nonsense.

It may not have been a lie. Sometimes people say things that turn out false. When they deliberately say falsehoods, then that's lying. And who knows, this might have actually happened and the guy is telling the truth.

This one is too easy to check. You ask a Chinese victim and a foreign victim how much they got paid. I also noticed that the Guardian piece did not weigh in on whether or not he lied. I would think that the reporter would check something like that.

The victims would be dead. You're not going to get very far with that approach. It also probably is illegal for the families of Chinese victims (should you happen to find them somehow) to give you that information. If not, the bureaucracy can always make it illegal whenever they feel like it.